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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved August 19, 2015 (received for review May 26, 2015)
Significance
Women remain underrepresented in academia as they continue to face a leadership gap, salary gap, and funding gap. Closing the funding gap is of particular importance, because this may directly retain women in academia and foster the closing of other gaps. In this study, we examined the grant funding rates of a national full population of early career scientists. Our results reveal gender bias favoring male applicants over female applicants in the prioritization of their “quality of researcher” (but not “quality of proposal”) evaluations and success rates, as well as in the language use in instructional and evaluation materials. This work illuminates how and when the funding gap and the subsequent underrepresentation of women in academia are perpetuated.
Abstract
We examined the application and review materials of three calls (n = 2,823) of a prestigious grant for personal research funding in a national full population of early career scientists awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Results showed evidence of gender bias in application evaluations and success rates, as well as in language use in instructions and evaluation sheets. Male applicants received significantly more competitive “quality of researcher” evaluations (but not “quality of proposal” evaluations) and had significantly higher application success rates than female applicants. Gender disparities were most prevalent in scientific disciplines with the highest number of applications and with equal gender distribution among the applicants (i.e., life sciences and social sciences). Moreover, content analyses of the instructional and evaluation materials revealed the use of gendered language favoring male applicants. Overall, our data reveal a 4% “loss” of women during the grant review procedure, and illustrate the perpetuation of the funding gap, which contributes to the underrepresentation of women in academia.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: ravanderlee{at}fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
↵2Present address: Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Author contributions: R.v.d.L. and N.E. designed research; R.v.d.L. performed research; R.v.d.L. analyzed data; and R.v.d.L. and N.E. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1510159112/-/DCSupplemental.
Gender contributes to grant funding success
Article Classifications
- Social Sciences
- Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
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